“Undoing” and “Golden”
Two poems by Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Order the Winter 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.
Randall Mann awarded Anna Lena Phillips Bell second place in our annual Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry competition, writing: “I love the economy yet fecundity of language in Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s poems, the sidelong wit and sense of wonder. My favorite of these is the villanelle ‘Undoing,’ the scrupulous pleasures and refusals therein: the play and pathos ‘spools past,’ slow but fast. And there is much to note in other poems too, the ‘style and stigma’ of flowers; the unexpected elegy for a hat, a hat a proxy for us all as we inevitably fall apart. In knowing, winning ways, the poet transforms the everyday into a kind of open secret.”
The two lyrics below, which appear in our Winter 2026 issue, can also be found in the poet’s forthcoming collection, Might Could, itself the winner of the 20th Anthony Hecht Prize from Waywiser Books.
Undoing The list, though long, won’t last— though, loosed to sing, the list spools past even evening. Won’t last, you, this fast, unpausing— you list, creased, task-stung. To last, rest, persist in ceasing. The list won’t last. Golden Poor spider, telling me the only way it could that it was caught between my sweater and me: with itchy legs, with tiny bites (I reckon—mouth too tiny to get at me). If you think someone is biting you, take off your clothes: the first rule of the garden. Don’t just pull your collar up in the mirror and glance and shrug; a shrug could crush to death a tiny jumping-spider there at your shoulder by no fault but for being as close to something growing as it could—no, not you, the loose-knit chartreuse cotton. Let it out, into the grass and weeds, fabric it knows. Its gray-furred legs, its sparking golden eyes. Its jaws ready to seize something its size.
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Might Could, forthcoming in 2026 from the Waywiser Press, Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. Bell teaches at UNC Wilmington and is the editor of Ecotone. She lives with her family near what’s now called the Cape Fear River.
Order the Winter 2026 issue of Nimrod International Journal or subscribe today.